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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Google Celebrates Ada Lovelace With a Beautiful Doodle

If you missed it, Google has celebrated the 197th birthday of Ada Lovelace with a beautiful Google doodle. She is often referred to the first programmer and is chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. As an English mathematician who worked at the advent of the concept of general computing, her work set the stage upon which all modern developers strut their stuff.

I have been a fan of Lady Lovelace as far back as I can remember. For me, she romantically ties together every world that I find fascinating: as a programmer, she’s one of the first researchers to give computers to science; as a writer, she’s the daughter then absentee father poet Lord Byron, friend of Mary Shelley author of Frankenstein. As a developer and a science fiction author (and reader) I couldn’t be immediately fall in love with her impact on Victorian mathematics and eventually modern computer science.

Ada’s early notes on programming Babbage’s engine are extremely important for the history of general computing—in fact, it’s apparent she foresaw the eventual nature of computers to move beyond raw number crunching and reach into the era where they would perform a myriad of tasks. One of those tasks is as a word processor, layout engine, and possibly within minutes of my writing these words, translate them across the globe for thousands to read.

The Google Doodle has Ada sitting at a desk, quill in hand, jotting away a program onto a scroll of paper—this forms the word Google—and as the scroll marches onwards spelling the name of the search juggernaut, it passes by iconic innovations in the history of computing. First appears the rows of silver buttons and a wooden box that could have housed the very Analytical Engine she wrote that code for. Next, what looks as if it could be a Atanasoff–Berry Computer, one of the first digital computing devices ever produced—with wires and gauges hanging about. After that the scroll passes what looks like the green-lit monitor of perhaps an early IBM personal computer. It finally ends next to modern day devices such as the sleek laptop and a tablet PC.

We’ve come a long way since the brass keys and wooden box of Victorian mechanical computers—and we still have a great deal of distance to go with general computing.

I salute Lovelace’s amazing contribution to technology, to all my chosen vocations from computer science to science fiction, and I hope that you spend a minute or two to read up on her life and work.

About Kyt Dotson

Kyt Dotson is a Senior Editor at SiliconAngle and works to cover beats surrounding DevOps, security, gaming, and cutting edge technology. Before joining SiliconAngle, Kyt worked as a software engineer starting at Motorola in Q&A to eventually settle at Pets911.com where he helped build a vast database for pet adoption and a lost and found system. Kyt is a published author who writes science fiction and fantasy works that incorporate ideas from modern-day technological innovation and explore the outcome of living with those technologies.